Recent history demonstrates that weapons of mass destruction can be built and deployed by almost any individual or group that has an intent to cause harm or that is looking for media attention for its cause. The arsenal of weapons available to the terrorist includes chemical and biological agents. These weapons, banned from wartime usage, have nevertheless proliferated in third world countries. Information on the development and deployment of these weapons has become widely available on the Internet. Materials to produce some agents are also readily available. Certain biological agents pose a particularly insidious threat in that a clandestine release into a population may not be noticed during the incubation period of the resultant disease. Yet, concerning agents such as anthrax, once the symptoms are manifested it is no longer possible to treat the victim and high mortality is inevitable. Contagious agents like smallpox or the plague pose even greater threats. Such agents require early identification of an infected population in order to treat the victims and contain a potentially devastating epidemic.
Use of biological weapons therefore poses very serious crisis and consequence management issues. Various State and local emergency management plans utilize fire, rescue, and law enforcement first responders to provide emergency assistance, to control an incident site, and to collect evidence for criminal prosecution. For clandestine bio-agent releases, the medical community may be the first to see patients present with uncommon diseases. These diseases include small pox, plague, tularemia, anthrax, etc., and have a high mortality rate. In order to institute measures to contain disease outbreaks, public health officials must receive timely reports from agencies and health providers in their jurisdiction. Early warning is a key to managing an epidemic and saving lives. However, the first indicators of a bio-terrorist event may be the onset of disease in humans and animals. And professionals from the health care community may not be able to recognize the early signs of diseases that would result from bio-terrorism. Early diagnosis of such diseases is often difficult because the diseases generate only common “flu-like” initial symptoms. For example, FIG. 1 lists several characteristics of some of the most threatening biological agents, including initial symptoms associated with exposure.
To overcome the obstacles concerning an effective early warning system, improved technology is needed. Information technology and advanced telecommunications can play a major role in improving surveillance for biological weapons of mass destruction. Information integrated from multiple sources that interface with the health care needs of a community can provide early warning for the onset of an outbreak resulting from terrorist activities. FIGS. 2A and 2B illustrate the potential impact of earlier warning on the survivability of a hypothetical bio-terrorist attack. As shown in FIG. 2B, even seemingly small advances in early warning timing could save a tremendous number of lives.
However, there are significant limitations with previous attempts at constructing early warning bio-surveillance systems. Conventional bio-surveillance focuses on categorical data collected from emergency rooms, clinics, and other healthcare facilities. The detection algorithms in these conventional systems rely on threshold crossing algorithms applied to single streams of data. Such an approach does not make optimal use of available information and cannot detect a bio-terrorist attack until sizeable numbers of infected individuals appear at healthcare facilities.
Further, conventional bio-surveillance is labor-intensive. For an early warning system to be a viable option several processes must be instituted. First, data from multiple agencies that interface with human health, animal health, and agriculture must be collected and forwarded to a central integration facility. In most systems, a human analyst is needed to review all the data received to extract indicators of a bio-terrorist event. If indicators are found, the analyst needs to assemble the knowledge to form an argument. When an argument is sufficiently mature, the analyst must originate alerts to the specific organizations that need to respond to the incident. This form of bio-surveillance requires continuous support, delays alerts and may be cost prohibitive for the agencies both supporting and analyzing the data.
A need exists therefore for an automated early warning bio-surveillance detection and alerting system. Such a system should be capable of operating continuously with minimal human intervention, and should exploit the data collection and analysis capabilities of modem information technology and advanced telecommunications.